By Shelby Daniel

The convergence of various breaking stories with today’s ever-expanding media landscape has led breaking news to become more “breaking” than ever before. Within seconds, a simple sentence can pop up on a screen and change the cadance of daily routines.

News alerts slide themselves ever-so-sleekly into our notification feeds, making them just another notification in our technology-dominated communication sphere. Learning about the most recent government tax proposal or the latest threat from North Korea has become as simple as reading an “on my way!” text.

What is alarming about this instantaneous connection to the news is how much it has become an ingrained and pivotal part of our lives. In the past, reading the newspaper over morning coffee was somewhat of a ritual, making the consumption of media a daily activity, but nevertheless one that had a beginning and an end. Now, anyone with a smartphone can never quite detach themselves from news.

Take social media, for example. What began as a means of expressing daily thoughts and routine things morphed into an instantaneous source of national and international information, making a large portion of interactions on social media into discussions of news-worthy events.

Push notifications have become such an ingrained part of acquiring new information that something, The New York Times calls “alert fatigue” can set in. Alert fatigue happens when readers decide that an excess of push notifications become more of a nuisance than anything and end up deactivating them.

To keep alert fatigue from setting in, it is important for news outlets to carefully construct their push notifications to grab the attention of viewers. This means that notifications have to become more than just snappy headlines – they have to summarize a major event in about 150 characters.

Push notifications then raise the question of what makes something newsworthy. To prevent alert fatigue, news headlines have to be intriguing, relevant, and most importantly, succinct enough to capture the interest of readers.

However, despite news becoming such an ingrained part of our daily lives, one has to wonder how the emergence of push notifications has affected newspaper readership in both print and online forms.

A Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Alliance of Audited Media shows that total weekday circulation for U.S. daily newspapers – both print and digital – fell eight percent in 2016, the 28th consecutive year of declines, with Sunday circulation also falling by eight percent.

This means that while people are aware of the news that happens around them, they have a very loose understanding of the events. The limited range of information that can be offered by push notifications makes for a reader that is not fully aware of developing stories.

Ultimately, push notifications allow media consumers to become more immersed in the news by producing easily accessible and concise information. Whether or not the public can actually become fully informed with the limited information from these notifications is still to be determined.